


silence lay steadily

by MathildaHilda



Series: tempus mortis [2]
Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Non-Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26918854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: It’s her casket. Her funeral. Her flowers. Her dead mouth sealed shut. Her matted hair and her pale skin.Her dead body.She shakes her head. The man watches.“That’s not-““Not you? No, I hope not. Otherwise, I’d be very concerned over who I’m speaking with,” he says as if humor could possibly save something as ludicrous as this moment.
Relationships: Shirley Crain & Steven Crain
Series: tempus mortis [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1982516
Kudos: 21





	silence lay steadily

**Author's Note:**

> Title from; The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

”Who are you?” She asks, once her eyes are drawn away from the casket to the only other occupant of the room.

He stands in front of her, head bent low over the casket as if looking at something very important, even though she can’t yet see just what – or who – exactly he is looking at. His hands are in his pockets, shoulders up to his ears. There’s an unruly mop of dark hair atop his head.

He’s pale. She knows this, long before he turns around.

He wears glasses, she sees, once he turns around. Shoulders still high and hands still in the pockets. A faint smile on his pale face.

A sad smile, she would’ve thought, had she focused.

The corpse in the casket made focusing near impossible.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he says, in a voice so unknown to her that she almost flinches away. He hasn’t moved since he’d turned around.

He’d only looked at her. Still does.

“W-who…?” She stutters, wants to take a step back but takes one forward instead.

“I’ll go with you,” he says, and he suddenly has a face that one could punch, if the occasion ever were to arise.

He nods his head in the direction of the casket. Red, like the door. Red, like her shirt.

( _red, like ~~Nell’s~~ blood_,)

She stares only at him, once her body has decided to keep moving forward. Eyes locked on his eyes, doubled in the thick glass. She doesn’t think he’s supposed to wear glasses, but she can’t quite understand why she’d think that.

He keeps smiling. He moves a hand from his pocket, placing it on the closed half of the casket.

“Who are you?” She asks again. His smile falls.

“You know. You just have to look.” He moves back a step, allowing her more room.

It’s her casket. Her funeral. Her flowers. Her dead mouth sealed shut. Her matted hair and her pale skin.

Her dead body.

She shakes her head. The man watches.

“That’s not-“

“Not you? No, I hope not. Otherwise, I’d be very concerned over who I’m speaking with,” he says as if humor could possibly save something as ludicrous as this moment.

“What?” She turns to him, her corpse still in the corner of her eye. So still. So dead.

The smile is back. She knows that smile. She _has_ to know that smile.

 _What_ the _fuck_ has happened in her life for her to remember the _smile_ but not the _man_? _What_ the _fuck_ is happening if she keeps thinking he _shouldn’t_ wear glasses when he clearly _is_?

 _What_ the _fuck_ is this _moment_?

“You’re not supposed to have glasses,” she almost whispers. She’s never this quiet.

He looks at the glasses as if noticing them for the first time, makes a small sound in surprise, and gently plucks them off. He folds them in his hands.

There’s a wedding band.

“Suppose not. Only for special occasions, then,” he says, _still smiling_ that fucking smile she can’t understand.

“Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck is that?” She points at the corpse, still in its state of death.

He sighs, then.

“You never know how to really look, do you, Shirley?”

He walks back down the aisle from where she’d come, tapping his glasses against his hand. There’s a heaviness to his walk. A rigidness to the spine.

( _like an unopened book,_

_still in its casing,_

_the back not broken yet,_

_no pages torn out,_

_simply there,_

_untouched,_

_and, yet, destroyed beyond all repair_ ,)

He sits down on the third row of chairs and tucks the glasses in his breast pocket. Suit and tie – black for the occasion.

( _red tie_ ,)

There’s a pain and a grief to his eyes now, one that was probably there until she pointed out the glasses, but that now shine out as if through a giant magnifying glass. His eyes are terrifying, she decides.

So dark they could be black. She can’t quite see the whites of his eyes from the distance.

“I am-” he begins. He stops and tilts his head to the side as if wondering just exactly how to start. Biting the inside of his cheek.

Taps the bridge of his nose.

“-a copy,” he concludes, his hands waving out to the sides.

“A _copy_?” She asks, moving ever so slowly toward him.

“A copy of a copy. Not quite there unless you know what to really look for. Not quite a fake, but fake enough to not be real.”

“That makes no sense,” she says. He sighs, “no, I suppose it doesn’t.”

“I am a copy of so many other copies that have been created down the line, that no one can quite remember just what exactly the original looked like. You can thank Home for that.”

She opens her mouth to ask what that meant when he pats the seat next to him.

“The House – Home, for whatever it could be worth – has no originality about itself. It can’t be the only haunted house in the world, but it can certainly be the most famous one. The one that scares adults into sleeping with their nightlights on.”

He taps his fingers against the chair in front of him. Some nervous tick or other that would have perhaps been satisfied with a pen, she thinks for otherworldly reasons.

“Hill House is a copy of itself – both _inside_ and _out_. A copy of the blueprint, simply made different with brick and concrete.” He pauses, stares into thin air. “Every wish, every dream, every memory, and so on – _all of it_ – is a copy of the original. Of the original wish, the original dream. The original memory. Eventually, you’ll have little to no recollection of what the original actually looked like. What it _actually_ was. What it _actually_ represented.”

He chuckles, as if talking about it reminded him of a joke.

“Everyone’s a copy of themselves, be it by their own hand or someone else’s. Someone else’s dream for us turning us into something completely different from who we are or were meant to be. Our own perception of ourselves is a copy because it changes every time, and no copy can be exactly identical, no matter how hard we try.”

He looks at her. She has almost forgotten the horror in the casket.

“If everything’s copying everything, what then could the House do? Once it’s fed itself on your imagination? Once it’s seen your dream – a happy family, in a forever house with lights on the porch and pot roast on Sundays? What could a house like that possibly do?”

He’s playing with her. No, not him.

The House.

The House is playing with her, but she can’t think about that right now, because her brother is staring her straight in the face and asking her – _begging her_ – to understand.

Her brother, begging to be known for the first time in _years_.

“Steve?” She whispers, her anger melting away for one, small moment when he smiles in some form of acknowledgment. In some form of love.

A copy, of a copy, of a copy, right up until the House knew. It doesn’t matter what the House knew.

It. Just. _Fucking_. Knew.

He doesn’t answer her. Doesn’t nod. Doesn’t play with his hands.

He only looks at her and smiles, and she can just about see the little boy.

The little boy with the black eyes and bloody nose – waiting in the foyer, just beyond her line of sight.

“You have to wake up, Shirl. You can’t stay here.”

She’s ten, almost eleven, when she says, “come with me.”

And, he almost smiles when he says, “it’s too late.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is essentially a rewrite of a part of my other fic; 'Tempus Mortis' in which Steve is dead from the get-go. Hence, why Shirley doesn't recognize him as Steve because, well, she's never known him as an adult. To her, he's always been a kid.
> 
> I might make a small series of this, with "adult ghost Steve" is just haunting his siblings while in the House in the last episode, but I haven't decided yet.


End file.
